Ron DeSantis continues to say he would prioritize changing university accreditation to penalize diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, given “changes in the composition of the student bodies” created under the philosophical framework.
“When I’m President, we’re going to make sure that the approved accreditors are only going to accredit if you don’t do DEI and if you treat people as individuals and make it a meritocracy,” the Governor said at a town hall in Concord, New Hampshire.
The Governor framed his position as a defense of Asian Americans, who he said have been unfairly penalized.
“If they just treated people by merit, there would be a higher percentage of Asians than what they ended up doing. And so they didn’t want that. And so what they would do, they created a new category of like personality, right? And they would just rate the Asians as poor on that metric and (that) just gave them an excuse to be able to limit the number of people,” DeSantis said.
“These are students that are getting discriminated against just because other people of the group that they were lumped in with happened to perform.”
DeSantis has suggested that DEI initiatives should be targeted by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and has made similar arguments before.
“Part of the reason universities operate the way they are is because they need to get accredited and these accreditors are all trying to create the types of universities that we object to as conservatives,” DeSantis explained during an October interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Earlier, in his first term, his administration greenlighted much of it in the very colleges he’s targeted more recently.
DeSantis told reporters in February he was ignorant of the subject back then.
“I didn’t know what DEI was a couple of years ago as this had taken hold. I mean, it sounds innocuous, right? I thought maybe diversity of ideas, maybe actually have more than one viewpoint. Well, that’s not what it is. What it is, is trying to enforce a political agenda and a political orthodoxy under the auspices of administration,” DeSantis said. “And that is something that is not in the best interests of the state.”
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